Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) offers a series of useful resources for economists. MyIdeas allows you to follow series, journals, authors and JEL codes for additions. If you subscribe to NEP mailing lists you will receive automatic updates on new working papers related to your fields. MPRA is a free public repository where you can distribute your working papers, as an alternative to other repositories (not from RePEc) such as arXiv or SSRN.

Most online paper repositories can be accessed from campus. Additionally, the Penn State Libraries website allows you to download papers from any location, logging into your Web-Access account. It also allows you to reserve books, and request books from other libraries.

Chances are you will eventually have to use \(\LaTeX\) to typeset your documents, and learning to use it may take some practice. If you are not familiar with it, the sooner you start the better. It is possible to survive using Scientific Workplace, but it has limited capabilities and compatibility issues, and, in the long run, it can be a lot more time-consuming. If you feel extremely uncomfortable with mark-up languages, we recommend that you try LyX. Otherwise, you can install MikTex (for Windows) or TexLive (for Mac/Linux), and a free integrated user interface such as TexMaker. You will find plenty of LaTeX tutorials on Google. The LaTeX wiki is also a good reference. ShareLaTeX is an excellent solution to use LaTeX alone or with couathors without having to install any software on your computer, you only need a web browser!!